Senior figures within the UK hospitality industry have hit out over tourism tax proposals that could have a significantly damaging effect on the crucial market sector.

Key voices within the hospitality industry have urged chancellor Philip Hammond policy to override plans to impose a tourism levy on overnight stays in major UK cities.

A number of councils, including those in Birmingham, Bath and Edinburgh, have brought forward proposals that would put a per-person per-night charge on hotel stays in their respective areas, much to the chagrin of those in the industry.

Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality, has been one of the most prominent voices against such practices and in a draft letter to Hammond she commented that the addition of any such levy would be of great detriment.

“I am writing to convey our profound opposition to such policy and our sincere concern over the impact any additional taxation would wreak on an already-strained and over-burdened sector,” she said.

Besides the clear pecuniary burden any practice would put on business owners Nicholls said a tourism tax would also “create bizarre incentives” for visitors to not use hotel properties during their stays.

“Conversely, those who come for a day trip, stay with friends or use a home-sharing service, such as Airbnb, will not contribute a penny, despite using local amenities. This is inequitable and illogical,” she said.

The number of councils looking into imposing a form of tourism tax has grown in the last 12 months following an announcement that hotel stays in Birmingham will have a levy applied to them when the city hosts the Commonwealth Games in 2022.A number of other local bodies have fol- lowed suit since but each revelation has been met with consistent criticism from those in the industry.

Mike Cherry, chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, said: “Our visitor economy is a huge success story,contributing more than £125bn to the economy annually and providing vast tax receipts to pay for public services.

“Small firms operating in the tourism sector are already up against high business rates, rising employment costs and surging input prices, particularly where utilities are concerned.

“Adding tourist taxes to the mix would mean yet another reason for small B&B, hotel and hostel owners to spend time away from running and growing their firms.”

The UK hospitality industry already faces one of the highest tax rates in Europe and is under growing threat from the proliferation of accommodation services such as Airbnb, which itself has been criticised for its negative impact on various continental cities.

As far as the wide ranging industry is concerned,the onus of government should be supporting the crucial hospitality sector, not allowing it to be further burdened at such a crucial time.

About

Bacta represents the amusement and gaming machine industry in the UK, encompassing high-tech and creative manufacturers, machine suppliers for pubs, clubs and bingo halls, as well as operators of Family Entertainment Centres.

You can find out more about which cookies we are using or switch them off in settings.

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

You can adjust all of your cookie settings by navigating the tabs on the left hand side.

Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.

disable

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.

3rd Party Cookies

This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.

Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.

disable

Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!

Cookie Policy

More information about our cookie policy hereunder detailed below

Cookie Policy for Bacta

This is the Cookie Policy for Bacta, accessible from https://www.bacta.org.uk

What Are Cookies

As is common practice with almost all professional websites this site uses cookies, which are tiny files that are downloaded to your computer, to improve your experience. This page describes what information they gather, how we use it and why we sometimes need to store these cookies. We will also share how you can prevent these cookies from being stored however this may downgrade or 'break' certain elements of the sites functionality.

For more general information on cookies see the Wikipedia article on HTTP Cookies.

How We Use Cookies

We use cookies for a variety of reasons detailed below. Unfortunately in most cases there are no industry standard options for disabling cookies without completely disabling the functionality and features they add to this site. It is recommended that you leave on all cookies if you are not sure whether you need them or not in case they are used to provide a service that you use.

Disabling Cookies

You can prevent the setting of cookies by adjusting the settings on your browser (see your browser Help for how to do this). Be aware that disabling cookies will affect the functionality of this and many other websites that you visit. Disabling cookies will usually result in also disabling certain functionality and features of the this site. Therefore it is recommended that you do not disable cookies.

The Cookies We Set

Email newsletters related cookiesThis site offers newsletter or email subscription services and cookies may be used to remember if you are already registered and whether to show certain notifications which might only be valid to subscribed/unsubscribed users.

Site preferences cookiesIn order to provide you with a great experience on this site we provide the functionality to set your preferences for how this site runs when you use it. In order to remember your preferences we need to set cookies so that this information can be called whenever you interact with a page is affected by your preferences.

Third Party Cookies

In some special cases we also use cookies provided by trusted third parties. The following section details which third party cookies you might encounter through this site.

This site uses Google Analytics which is one of the most widespread and trusted analytics solution on the web for helping us to understand how you use the site and ways that we can improve your experience. These cookies may track things such as how long you spend on the site and the pages that you visit so we can continue to produce engaging content.For more information on Google Analytics cookies, see the official Google Analytics page.

Third party analytics are used to track and measure usage of this site so that we can continue to produce engaging content. These cookies may track things such as how long you spend on the site or pages you visit which helps us to understand how we can improve the site for you.

From time to time we test new features and make subtle changes to the way that the site is delivered. When we are still testing new features these cookies may be used to ensure that you receive a consistent experience whilst on the site whilst ensuring we understand which optimisations our users appreciate the most.

As we sell products it's important for us to understand statistics about how many of the visitors to our site actually make a purchase and as such this is the kind of data that these cookies will track. This is important to you as it means that we can accurately make business predictions that allow us to monitor our advertising and product costs to ensure the best possible price.

The Google AdSense service we use to serve advertising uses a DoubleClick cookie to serve more relevant ads across the web and limit the number of times that a given ad is shown to you.For more information on Google AdSense see the official Google AdSense privacy FAQ.

We also use social media buttons and/or plugins on this site that allow you to connect with your social network in various ways. For these to work the following social media sites including; Whatsapp, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, we will set cookies through our site which may be used to enhance your profile on their site or contribute to the data they hold for various purposes outlined in their respective privacy policies.

More Information

Hopefully that has clarified things for you and as was previously mentioned if there is something that you aren't sure whether you need or not it's usually safer to leave cookies enabled in case it does interact with one of the features you use on our site.

However if you are still looking for more information then you can contact us through one of our preferred contact methods: